List of Civs made OP by settings:

danaphanous

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This is a just for fun list of scenarios that are essentially OP given different civilizations abilities and the map settings. Please help me to construct a full list! Run these combinations if you want an easy game that snowballs.

  1. Celts on boreal: so much faith it leads to your choice of nearly every belief in a religion while most other civs will struggle to expand on the setting. Choose Dance of Aurora and you can do whatever you want.
  2. Iroquois on boreal: great movement, city connection, and combat boosts to their UU allows for rapid exploration and early conquest. Their UB renders the terrain much more productive than any other civ can as well.
  3. Inca on highlands: While everyone else can't grow you can, and fast with good production and cheap/fast transportation
  4. Carthage on Archipelago: Carthage gets instantly free harbor connections to the capital as soon as they build every city. In addition to gold from the city connections the free harbors will bring in a lot of extra gold on trade routes.
  5. Indonesia on Archipelago: Gets 2 free unique luxuries for all of their initial 3 cities. A very strong start which leads to great early happiness and easy city spamming.
  6. Polynesia on Archipelago: immediately can explore and get all the ruins. Guaranteed to meet everyone first and easy Moai placement for culture output.
  7. England on Archipelago: +2 movement to water units gives huge advantage and Archipelago renders most capitals coastal allowing for an easy conquest ability with ship of the line.
  8. Morocco on desert sands: Kasbah can utilize worthless desert tiles no one else can work. Your cities will be normal while other civs will struggle everywhere but flood plains.
  9. Brazil on heavy jungle map (hot/forested): Takes a while to take effect but every jungle preserved will be a great culture/tourism output later. On a heavy jungle map you can't be beaten. Brazilwood camp OP!
  10. Dutch on Hot/Wet: loads of marsh/floodplains lead to huge cities with polder. On the right settings most of your cities will easily grow over 50 pop if you can keep happiness up--their UA helps with this.
  11. Aztecs with any high-lake-density preset with raging-barbs: their abilities enable a lot of extra culture early game from the barbs. The high lake density will ensure monster growth in the cities after the floating gardens are built to ensure late-game dominance in science and production as well.
  12. Songhai on pangea/marathon/raging-barbs: the triple gold from taking encampments is great and marathon lengthens the time that new encampments keep spawning and makes the gold worth more. You have so much gold you can buy your way through most early-game builds.
  13. Germans on marathon/pangea/raging barbs: while it take everyone else ages to build military you can open honor and recruit massive armies to wipe out the world in the ancient era. If you struggle for gold just threaten CS for it with your armies plus you get a natural unit cost discount anyway. This works even if you delete your settler and play with no cities. ;)http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=524417
  14. Greece with maxed CS numbers: you will need to prioritize allying them but when you do their UA keeps them allied very easily for a huge influx of bonuses. Greece may be the only civ that could easily ally all the extra CS's due to their UA though several benefit from having more around.
  15. Siam with maxed CS numbers: You will need to prioritize allying CS as it does not give you an immediate bonus, esp. maritime. By midgame they will be providing a huge amount of food and culture to your cities allowing for far faster empire and policy growth than would be normally possible.
  16. Spain on huge map with reduced civ numbers: prioritizing exploration will bring in massive amounts of early gold and allow you to settle several natural wonders. Game snowballs pretty quickly from there.
  17. Sweden on huge map with maxed civ & CS numbers: The AI will constantly be fighting with these settings, meanwhile you are free to build a small, solid empire and easily find 10 or more friends to more than double your great person generation. If you get a few GP's you don't care for simply gift them to CS to gain an alliance and they are strongly suited to war and expansion midgame when the 2 UU become available and the AI are wanting you to help in their fights.

Requirements for entry: must be overtly OP, not just moderately buffed and be a clear synergy between a civ and a particular map style. For instance, of course shaka and every early war civ is good on a duel map but the synergy should not be a duel-map one but one suitable for other settings.
 
Regarding #9, raging barbs will actually be against the German UA. They require more camps, and the spawn rate of camps is not affected by this setting (you still get the same amount of camps with or without raging camps). The spawn rate of barbs inside camps is increased meaning it will be harder to clear camps so you gather your military slower, and time is key because as the game progresses there will be less and less land for barb camps to spawn. What would be an advantage is having a map with more land, so if you modify the land/water ratio it may become better. In such map piety to reformation and taking heathen conversion may actually be a very good strategy.
 
I've done the germany thing and it is unstoppable early-game if the AI doesn't start with a large tech bonus (like on Deity) playing marathon.

I play raging barbs for a few unintuitive reasons: True it makes them more bothersome but I'm envisioning you've opened honor so you have big advantages against the barbarians and their high spawn rate just means loads of extra culture to more rapidly advance through the honor tree which is culture poor so you get those military advantages quicker. It also means a quick 2 levels for all the new recruits and raging barbs tends to punish the AI and make them turtle. They lose a lot of workers and settlers because they are stupid making them more vulnerable and slower to expand with it enables. Spawn rates of camps is related to the remaining unexplored fog in the world (not sure if it is foggy land or all fog) but regardless raging barbs also indirectly makes camps spawn faster for longer since the AI scouts get capped earlier leaving more unexplored land. You need to make sure you leave fog though or you'll hurt yourself. In my tests camps kept spawning fast and for longer on raging barbs but granted it was "unofficial". Not sure how you'd test the effect scientifically or objectively.

That would be my reasoning for it but you are right that since it doesn't effect camp spawning it will have no effect on recruitment rate other than the indirect one related to the remaining fog of war.
 
Marathon barbs with honor also let you train your units to the XP cap for fighting barbs pretty fast. This setting should benefit Aztec also.

England on archipelago: Ship movement speed is a large advantage, and this civ also boosts one of the top conquest options.

Huns on arid Pangaea/marathon: You don't need to tech much before you have your end game unit.

Hiawatha on Boreal: Not as good as Celts, but lots of trees and infinite access to UU is a lot of gold savings + early power. UB isn't terrible here either.
 
I agree with you on england and iroquois. I'm not so sure the aztec is enough to call a synergy. Basically any map with high barbs works well for that not necessarily marathon. Do aztec get a double cultture bonus from barbs if they go honor? Same reasoning for Huns and other warlike civs with early UU. Pangaea does benefit them all in some ways but as long as you start on a large landmass with 1-2 neighbors you get a similar early-game opportunity. Pangaea doesn't really make them OP. My idea for the list was civs with particular terrain synergies that really enhanced certain abilities. If I include the huns I would need to include the Zulu and assyria.
 
I agree with you on huns, england, and iroquois. I'm not so sure the aztec is enough to call a synergy. Basically any map with high barbs works well for that not necessarily marathon. Do aztec get a double cultture bonus from barbs if they go honor?

Yes they do, but I'd say a lakes map would work better for them. Lakes map of any kind, Hot, raging barbs, and Marathon would make quite an interesting game. I'm not giving any reasons though because I haven't tried it, but their UB lets you grow like crazy with lakes. Their Water Mill replacement provides +15% Food and Each worked Lake tile provides +2 Food. That makes the map OP on any setting, but Marathon gets you more culture since Barbs are outrageous and everywhere.
 
I agree, did not think of floating gardens and the insanity of landlocked lakes. If you know a preset that reliably generates lakes I'll include them, that's a definitely OP synergy to have most of the cities near lakes.

We now have 12/43 civs on this list! At this rate I'll have to change the post to be: most OP map settings for each civilization. ;)

Should I include civs made OP by the cranking up CS numbers such as Siam/Greece?
 
Songhai on marathon with raging barbs is OP. It's seriously a lot of early gold.

Spain on a map with less than normal civs. You should find more Natural wonders.

Rammy or maybe Greece on a map with double the number of city states.
 
I agree with you on most of them. I've added Songhai and Greece to the list. Siam may have trouble allying all the extra CS as they have no bonuses to acquiring or keeping allies. However, if you could manage to keep all 21 CS as allies that would definitely be OP due to their UA. I'm just unsure if you could at higher difficulties without already being the tech and culture leader so it wouldn't give them an OP start at least.

Spain you are probably right but as you can't directly affect the occurrence of natural wonders I'm gonna leave them off the list for now. I can't think of any terrain settings that would guarantee them a solid NW start so not "OP" but I bet reducing civ numbers would help. There are many OP spain starts but they are usually seed based due to the randomness of them.

you can debate me on these issues if you have a good case. thx for the suggestions! :)

Other Suggestions that are under consideration:

- Siam with maxed CS numbers: concern is that they couldn't take advantage of it properly but it would be OP if they COULD ally them all
- Spain with Natural Wonders: definitely OP but can't think of a way to guarantee it. Someone suggested reducing civ numbers to give them more time to find/settle them.
- Early Warmonger civs on pangea with marathon: (Rome, Zulu, Huns, Assyria...) I thought this a bit too general as so many civs fit it. It does make playing for conquest easier though. More strongly considering Rome as marathon enhances their UA saving even more turns than usual.
 
Marathon speed setting is a huge nerf to the Aztecs (and to Honor, Pictish, Pracinhas, etc., basically anything that rewards you for kills). Far from making Aztecs OP, it makes their UA 1/3 as effective. The reason is that the culture costs scale with the speed setting, but the reward for kills does not. So killing a warrior for +8 culture on standard speed might be nice as it's a significant boost to getting the 25 culture you need for your first policy, but killing the same warrior on marathon speed does almost nothing to get you to the 75 culture you need for your first policy.

Raging barbs is definitely a boon to the Aztecs though, at any speed.
 
You are right. Also, I researched and marathon speed slows the spawn rates from camps so you are correct it will not help I think. On the other hand, marathon makes songhai's gold boost even better than you mentioned because the gold from camps on marathon is 225 for songhai, which is a lot more of an increase than the gold cost increases for things.

Updated OP and thanks!
 
Yeah the Isabella one with fewer civs isn't as strong as the ones you listed. You took most of the good ones though. If you wanted to beat it with every civ and were willing to cook the settings on each one, that's what I'd do with Isy.

Rammy with 20 city state allies on a normal sized map is disgusting.

I'm not convinced barb farming is nerfed on marathon compared to normal speed. For every 1 move your warrior can go in normal speed, he goes 3 moves in marathon. You end up discovering the World an entire era ahead of time and I've found that you find more barbarians. When I play marathon I usually have 2 or 3 units fully promoted where all they can do with a level up is heal. I don't think I've ever had even 1 unit do that on normal speed.
 
You are right. Also, I researched and marathon speed slows the spawn rates from camps so you are correct it will not help I think. On the other hand, marathon makes songhai's gold boost even better than you mentioned because the gold from camps on marathon is 225 for songhai, which is a lot more of an increase than the gold cost increases for things.

Updated OP and thanks!

This is quite different from what I recall but I had a long period of not playing the game, very long. How is the spawn rate scaling?
 
Not sure of exact math but probably same factor as everything. 1.5 for epic, 3 for marathon. It seems to me that the spawn rate from camps is definitely slowed. Raging barbs on standard you see new spawns every 2-3 turns. On marathon it is at least half that--probably so you don't get overwhelmed by them early game. This can make the game even more manageable for the songhai and germany who purposefully farm camps. You can play raging barbs and still be ok--esp. with honor as you have time to heal between spawns and can manage farming with a only a unit or two unlike on standard
 
Regarding Germany and the raging barbs: Raging Barbs doesn't actually increase the creation rate of barb camps. What it instead does is greatly increase the spawn rate of barb units from the existing camps. This actually slows down killing the camps and so Germany gets FEWER free units with this setting on than if it is off.

Instead it's best of settings that increase land area compared to water. Such as the numerous regional map scripts that have very few water hexes.
 
Any civ with a good mounted unique on Great Plains; probably the best would be Arabia on marathon Great Plains, ensuring maximum period of camel dominance. Mongolia also applies, although the camel is still much better than the Keshik.
One that is probably a bit more controversial, and is something I'm disclaiming as being good almost exclusively on single player, is Venice on something like marathon Pangaea at around emperor, with all the right settings for flatter land and with a bunch of city states. Right off Venice's first merchant, buying up city states will yield a huge army on emperor or immortal, especially compared to the armies of the AI you'd be moving against. Venice is great for rushes in around the late classical, when the major civ AI is struggling with infrastructure and doesn't have big armies, and on emperor or immortal these problems aren't gone for major AIs. However, at the same time, it's a high enough difficulty that CS are able to maintain an enormous and well modernized army, and marathon typically allows these armies to stay relevant for longer. Building merchant wonders, while painful, on maps with lots of CS allows Venice to buy huge and powerful armies with little diversion from a standard Venice game, making them not only hugely economically competitive but also able to compete militarily.
Of course this would never work on multiplayer, and it's somewhat up to debate compared to the other civs and their proper conditions.
 
I agree with you on england and iroquois. I'm not so sure the aztec is enough to call a synergy. Basically any map with high barbs works well for that not necessarily marathon. Do aztec get a double cultture bonus from barbs if they go honor? Same reasoning for Huns and other warlike civs with early UU. Pangaea does benefit them all in some ways but as long as you start on a large landmass with 1-2 neighbors you get a similar early-game opportunity. Pangaea doesn't really make them OP. My idea for the list was civs with particular terrain synergies that really enhanced certain abilities. If I include the huns I would need to include the Zulu and assyria.

Pangea just means that you finish the game before your unique unit goes away and before anyone else can get a tech lead or their own UU. In standard you can clear a Pangea in 100-120 turns generally, but on continents or something else it requires significantly longer.


But for other civs.

Babylon, Korea and Poland. Map setting doesn't matter. :p

Would playing as Sweden on a map with the civs pre chosen to be the low war, friendly civs qualify? +70% GP production is pretty amazing.
 
Siam with 41 city states. Until you try it, you haven't really played Siam. :)

Prioritize allying maritime city states first. You can work the most terrible dirt, because food just magically appears in your cities.

This is the setup I run after I get smashed on deity and need to feel like I'm still a boss at this game.
 
Any faction controlled by a human who knows how to XP farm, on Marathon
 
Which UU get the woodsman promotion? And how much does a Boral map boost them? If they get 2x movement, marathon speed would make that a serious buff. For Aztec, are there settings that get lakes and woods?
 
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